It is true that we are all unique and special in God's eyes. Each of us have our own special abilities, voice quality, quirks and ugly spots. Like fingerprints, there are no two similar ones.
However, if I may emphasize again, we are all unique and special in God's eyes. Why do I say that? Because the very limited wisdom of man pushes us to classify all things into categories, which means that there are standards, benchmarks, for everything. This life that we live is filled with two types of people, those who are pursuing for greatness in one or more of the standards that the world has set in terms of intelligence, beauty etc., and those who have utterly given up.
Let me illustrate by using the example of beauty in history. We cannot, in our finite imagination, conceive of someone with a cleft lip as beautiful at any point in time in history. The very fact that only a small percentage of babies are born with cleft lips, and especially given the limited technologies of the past, the standard of beauty is forever unavailable for the baby both a thousand years ago and today. However, in modern society, that has changed.
In the past, biological deviance is mostly measured in terms of minority/majority, i.e. having a sixth finger is ugly because most people are not known to have it. The concept of perfect beauty is simply having everything that the majority has. One can conceive of an African village where a female baby with fair skin is born amongst the majority ash-black skin members. It would then be impossible for the baby, in the closed context of the village, to be considered beautiful. We would find it strange, because the concept of "fairness" in modern society today is normally linked with beauty.
The tyranny for standards in the modern world is then this: The concept of beauty is no longer in the realm of the majority's (achievable) standard. Blame it on the mass media, on colonialism, on the capitalist, whatever. That is not the goal of this post. We could go on endlessly by pushing the blame around. What is important is that most people no longer can be considered beautiful. Where in the past, beauty was ruled by the tyranny of the majority, today, beauty is ruled by the tyranny of the minority (if any at all). The same goes for intelligence. And wealth. Rule by tyranny of the majority wasn't too bad, at least most people would be considered relatively beautiful in the past; rule of the majority is terrible, most people are playing catch-up with the minority, who themselves have an imagined minority to catch-up with (if they themselves even exist at all).
Yes, we are all unique. But we also have to admit that uniqueness doesn't play a big role in either traditional society or modern society. No man is truly unable to view his neighbor as wonderfully unique, unless he himself abandons the standards of the world that have been edged in stone and carved permanently into his heart as a child, and that is, as I write, being carved into the heart of children all over the world in the socializing process of "growing up".
Maturity can thus be defined as the degree of knowledge in making judgments of one's own behavior and standards, as well as that of his neighbor's, in comparison with the widely accepted standards of the world. A high level of maturity would imply the inclusion of a sensitive understanding of context, and a reasonable self-drive and initiative towards improving oneself as much as possible towards attaining these very high standards that he/her knows exist.
But in so doing, we apply symbolic violence to everyone, including ourselves. We destroy the "uniqueness" perspective, relegating it to little more than counseling strategies and "feel-good" religious doctrines that are meant for the despondent, depressed and hopeless to find a way to continue living. Everyone is simply starting from various distances to the ideal and driving towards one point of perfection, but finding they never get there. And upon giving up, one tends to create yet another standard to adhere to, most commonly one that he/she can perform well in compared to others. And the vicious cycle continues.
So let me throw in a perspective in the opposite direction. Regardless of one's structural position in society, true maturity is defined as the abandonment of all worldly standards of beauty, intelligence etc. except the one standard of morality, and truly looking at oneself and one other as truly unique, playing a role in this huge canvas God has painted and is still painting.
That is why being a Christian is so hard. If true maturity is the reverse of everything we have been taught since we were young, it is almost impossible for any of us to imagine this world functioning without these worldly standards that we have come to so intimately know, and even to hold on to as our mantras.
But is it not the expending of our resources and talents into achieving these worldly standards that at times, we neglect the Race of Life that God desires for us to run, the only measuring rod that He values, the standard of moral truth and living?
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. -Tyler Durden, Fight Club
What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men - each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature - are shot down wholesale. -Hermann Hesse
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